#mac crane

[comicwaren]

From Amazing Spider-Man Vol. 7 #031

Art by Patrick Gleason and Marcio Menyz

Written by Joe Kelly

[lgbtqreads]

Inside an Anthology: Be Gay, Do Crime, ed. by Molly Llewellyn and Kristel Buckley

Today on the site I’m delighted to offer a peek inside one of the best-named queer anthologies of all time, Be Gay, Do Crime ed. by Molly Llewellyn and Kristel Buckley, which releases June 3rd from Dzanc Books! Here’s the gist: A follow-up to their runaway success Peach Pit: Sixteen Stories of Unsavory Women, editors Molly Llewellyn and Kristel Buckley return with Be Gay, Do Crime, a celebration…

Inside an Anthology: Be Gay, Do Crime, ed. by Molly Llewellyn and Kristel Buckley

[becausegoodbye]

Reading more trans authors! This was an interesting one — I think it fails as a sci-fi novel¹, but mostly succeeds as literary fiction².

¹ (To be fair, it wasn't trying all that hard to be. The premise feels like classic dystopian sci-fi – a tyrannical government forces people to have extra shadows in lieu of prison time, making Shadesters a despised underclass – but it ends up functioning more like magical realism. I can happily accept a world in which something so metaphorical is happening literally, but what bothered me is that none of the characters with extra shadows had actually done anything bad enough to meaningfully test the reader's allegiances! Given the potency of the shadows metaphor, there was room here to do some really interesting stuff around abolitionism and anti-carcerality, but I feel like it kinda chickened out on that front?)

² (The writing captures the bleak disjunctive hollowness of grief *very* well. The narrator loses her wife in childbirth, and spends a lot of time bleakly circling the drain of her own mind in a way that was tough to read but very real. And the shell-shocked queer single parenthood that follows is wonderfully tender. "I finally understand what all the fuss is about: a tiny someone is predisposed to trust you and you have the chance to prove them right." I mean 😭)

It may not hang together perfectly as a novel, but there were an ton of individual sentences that made me go "oof", and that's an important metric too. Cool book; many oofs.

[autostraddle]

My queerness always came second to basketball. I thought of myself as a basketball player who happened to be queer. It was only when I graduated and lost high-level basketball that the order reversed and I started considering myself a queer person who once played basketball. Graduating and retiring from the game, the yearning felt a lot like the yearning of my closeted queer youth — the wanting and wanting for something that seems it cannot ever be. I felt at odds with myself. My queerness had always been so wrapped up in my playing. Without basketball, I had no framework for that part of my life either, no understanding of how to engage with or perform desire, no context for how to date or relate to others who weren’t athletes. I’d only ever dated basketball players except for the NARP (non-athletic regular person — yes, this was unfortunately a real term we used) who called me Number 12. She was an artist, which helped me tap into the writerly part of me I typically hid, but it would be many years before I settled into that identity. I’d have to convince myself basketball wasn’t the center of my world anymore. And in order to do that, I had to admit to myself, and then accept, that my playing days were over; there would be no professional overseas career for me thanks to my body, my arthritic, ruined, four-ACL-tears-deep body. If basketball has been my most profound love, then losing it has been my most profound grief. A grief made easier only because I don’t have to face it alone.

Mac Crane, The Sex of the Game

[smallcandlejar]

review: a sharp endless need

a sharp endless need- mac crane

summary: gay basketball players be gay and do basketball.

genre: romance, coming of age, sports.

review:

a sharp endless need is truly a poetic and well written novel. it follows our main character mack through her senior year of high school playing basketball and falling in love with teammate liv.

i can't lie its been a little while since i finished this book so it's not completely fresh in my mind. also, to admit my biases, i am a big women's basketball fan, however i have never played and i only really watch it for the pretty women on the court...

i was really excited to read this book, the premise sounded interesting and i love a good piece of literary fiction. it took me a while to get my head around what was happening. but when i did i really enjoyed it!

mack as a character is really interesting, she is both so confident in herself and at the same time so lost. being in her inner thoughts really helps you to understand her and move through this journey with her. it is important to note that this story is a retelling from some future mack reflecting on the past- this laces the book with a sense of nostalgia. as you move with mack you also seem to fall blindly in love with liv. liv might be my favourite character in the whole book. she is interesting, well rounded and complex. as much as you love her, you're frustrated with her which gives an added layer of complexity to the story. the romance between was also bittersweet. there are moments you really root for them as a couple, and others you think that they'd be better off with someone else. but that is the complicated nature of high school love; seeing people with rose tinted glasses. in the end it's up to you as the reader to decide how you feel about their relationship but regardless it will always be a little foggy.

the other characters in the book however really fall flat. i don't remember any of their names, their personalities or storylines (because i don't think they really have any.) perhaps that's their point- to be supplementary to mack and liv, and if you want to; it does show how mack is an unreliable narrator in some aspects. she is very narrow focused. overall though, i think it would have been nice to know the side characters more and have them at least be memorable.

the romance is the focus of the book, however it touches on some other key themes, the most prevalent being the struggles of living in a small town. having a family in a small town, going to school in a small town, and being gay in a small town. mack clearly is overwhelmed by all of these and is desperately clinging onto liv and basketball to escape. it's heartbreaking but real. this was my favourite aspect of the book by far. that's not to say i didn't enjoy the romance at all, i did! but these other aspects and themes are what make the book worth reading.

another theme that should not be missed are the hints at mack being trans in some compacity. there are numerous times in the story where we explore how mack feels about her gender. these elements are well done, and provide representation for a very underrepresented community. it was again both heartbreaking and heartwarming to read.

the amount of alcohol and drugs in this book are quite overwhelming, like it's in almost every chapter. maybe i was just a very boring high schooler but sometimes it does get to a point in the book every it feels very unrealistic. it is relatively easy to brush-off if you're able too, but there are a number of times that i would get caught up in the shear amount of substance abuse that i couldn't focus on anything else.

the pace of the book felt very slow to me, but i think that is the cost of the poetic writing. there are some truly beautiful lines in this book that highlight mac crane is a fantastic writer. its easy to tell this is a personal piece of work for them. however, at times it was a struggle to get through. also, there is a lot of basketball in this book, and sometimes there is jargon that might be a little hard to understand for someone who knows nothing of basketball- however it will not change how much you enjoy the book.

overall, i did enjoy this book but not as much as i hoped. i had really hyped it up in my head to be something that it wasn't. as much as this book is a romance it is an exploration of queerness, growing up and finding yourself.

i tried not to say too much about the book in order not to spoil it!

rating: 3/5

TLDR; gay people playing basketball with a large helping of small town trauma. heartbreaking, hopeful and homosexual.

[queereads-bracket]

Queer Fiction Free-for-All Book Bracket Tournament: Round 1A

Choose a book:

When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill

I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself by Mac (Marisa) Crane

Voting ended onFeb 15, 2025

Book summaries below:

When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill

Alex Green is a young girl in a world much like ours, except for its most seminal event: the Mass Dragoning of 1955, when hundreds of thousands of ordinary wives and mothers sprouted wings, scales, and talons; left a trail of fiery destruction in their path; and took to the skies. Was it their choice? What will become of those left behind? Why did Alex’s beloved aunt Marla transform but her mother did not? Alex doesn’t know. It’s taboo to speak of.

Forced into silence, Alex nevertheless must face the consequences of this astonishing event: a mother more protective than ever; an absentee father; the upsetting insistence that her aunt never even existed; and watching her beloved cousin Bea become dangerously obsessed with the forbidden.

In this timely and timeless speculative novel, award-winning author Kelly Barnhill boldly explores rage, memory, and the tyranny of forced limitations. When Women Were Dragons exposes a world that wants to keep women small—their lives and their prospects—and examines what happens when they rise en masse and take up the space they deserve.

Fantasy, historical fiction, alternate history, 1950s, adult

I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself by Mac (Marisa) Crane

In a United States not so unlike our own, the Department of Balance has adopted a radical new form of law enforcement: rather than incarceration, wrongdoers are given a second (and sometimes, third, fourth, and fifth) shadow as a reminder of their crime—and a warning to those they encounter. Within the Department, corruption and prejudice run rampant, giving rise to an underclass of so-called Shadesters who are disenfranchised, publicly shamed, and deprived of civil rights protections.

Kris is a Shadester and a new mother to a baby born with a second shadow of her own. Grieving the loss of her wife and thoroughly unprepared for the reality of raising a child alone, Kris teeters on the edge of collapse, fumbling in a daze of alcohol, shame, and self-loathing. Yet as the kid grows, Kris finds her footing, raising a child whose irrepressible spark cannot be dampened by the harsh realities of the world.

With a first-person register reminiscent of the fierce self-disclosure of Sheila Heti and the poetic precision of Ocean Vuong, I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself is a bold debut novel that examines the long shadow of grief, the hard work of parenting, and the power of queer resistance.

Science fiction, dystopia, speculative fiction, vignette, near future, adult

[comicwaren]

From Amazing Spider-Man Vol. 7 #032

Art by Patrick Gleason, Marcio Menyz and Erick Arciniega

Written by Joe Kelly

[greyari]

My favourite thing about "a sharp endles need" is how every homophobic character is slowly revealed to be gay. At this point in the book (a little over halfway through) 90% of prominent characters are queer and 100% of the characters are miserable.